Carrie McGath

Carrie McGath received her B.A. in English from Ohio University and her M.F.A. in poetry from Western Michigan University. McGath currently lives in Chicago and is working on her Masters in New Arts Journalism at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She works as a Graduate Lecturing Intern where she gives tours of collections at The Art Institute of Chicago. McGath is an occasional contributor to the art and culture journal based at SAIC, F News Magazine. Carrie is also a part of the "Friday Night Army" of art writers for Chicago Art Magazine.

Also by Carrie McGath

Small Murders

Small Murders

"Carrie McGath is, to borrow her own words, a ‘happy woman of knots.’ In her poems you will meet a windshield vandal whose weapon is lipstick in the shade of Fire Engine #45; a coveter of murdered dolls; a dashboard Mary who's been jilted; a doctor who holds up a newborn ‘like fresh catch off a pier’; Frida Kahlo folded up in somebody's sock drawer. You will encounter rape and ruination, sadness, dissection, miracles. These ruthlessly unsentimental, dark, angry-funny poems are spoken by ‘the loneliest girl in the time-zone’ and proferred—she pulls it off somehow—with an irrepressible good cheer."
—Nancy Eimers

"These poems restore the sense of tension to the present tense, as their speakers contemplate unsettling hallucinatory events and impressions. Beneath this restless, disoriented, ‘terrifyingly calm’ voice you can detect a muted hysteria clenching and muttering like Edgar Allan Poe on Zoloft at 4 A.M Something not quite usual is pulsing away here, curled up in the glovebox, the closet, the chest of drawers, and it has something personal and pointed to say. Meet Carrie McGath’s spooky entourage of mannequins, dolls, libidinous objects, figures and effigies that alternately interrogate and judge, constantly threatening to leave, and threatening never to leave. Then try—you can always try—to forget them."
—J. Allyn Rosser

"‘You Are a Rifle in My Closet’ is a strangely strong poem that develops its haunting metaphor to lament and protest an endlessly deferred possibility of fulfillment. In ‘Two Men in Sepia Came to Me,’ another outstanding poem, the speaker has responded to such frustration by sinking into an inner world of phantasmagorical passion. McGath taps into deep metaphoric veins in these poems."
—Mark Halliday

"Juxtaposing imagery of fractured delicacy, birds' wings, eggshells and doll's heads, with uncompromising hardness of gun barrels and wooden chests, she captures an uncanny world where a semblance of normality veils overripe fantasies and violence."
—Aisha Motiani, Milwaukee's Shepherd Express

Poem

Two Men in Sepia Came to Me

And two men in sepia come to me tonight
as you snore next to me. They enter
my brain through my ear slots.
How well the two of them blend in,
in their twilight camouflage.
Tonight, I chose to sleep naked, body and brain,
in expectation of them.

We eat imaginary lobster at an imagined banquet.
Rabbits multiply at my feet, but not by anyone else’s.
I breast-feed a thousand newborns.
A line forms behind me, hungry.
I crave a gimlet.
Today has been long and threatens to be longer.
These men in sepia have brought me to a world
where daylight never ends, the light by which I feed rabbits.
My nipples now as round and red as plums.
I want to be in a world of wet.